Video camera networks are ubiquitous. Over 30 million cameras produce close to 4 billion hours of video footage per week in the United States alone. This proliferation is taking place since, unlike other sensing modalities, visible-light cameras provide excellent space-time resolution, long capture range, wide field of view, and low latency.

In that context, and with the ever decreasing cost of IP cameras, the need for simple but yet robust surveillance applications is becoming a glaring issue. Three such applications have been (1) abnormality detection, (2) multicamera processing, and (3) efficient video-content retrieval. In this presentation, it will be shown how simple methods based on low-level bit-wise processing can lead to surprisingly accurate higher level results.